Housing in Korea

Apartments View in Korea

     

1. Why Koreans Like Apartments So Much

When I was a child, my dream was simple: to see, with my own eyes, the rolling green pastures dotted with grazing sheep that I had only ever known from picture books. I promised myself that someday, as an adult, I would go — to England, to France, to Switzerland. Even now, the memory of that first sight still makes my heart flutter. Like me, many Koreans grow up quietly longing for Europe's green fields. And if you've ever visited Korea yourself, you already know why: the apartment view.

Koreans may well be the one people on earth that Europeans can never quite understand — a nation devoted to apartment living. When I was young, apartments were rare and precious. Living in one meant you were the child of a wealthy family, and everyone wanted an excuse to visit. In my entire elementary school class, only one or two kids lived in an apartment. That's how special it once was.

That collective longing to live in an apartment shaped the next fifty years of Korean history. The country built apartment after apartment, and eventually, everyone moved in. Today, Korea's apartment skyline may be one of the most singular sights in the world. Foreign visitors often arrive imagining sweeping tiled-roof hanok or cozy thatched cottages — only to be stunned by the endless towers filling Seoul's skyline. Even in the quietest countryside, wherever there's a patch of buildable land, you'll almost always find one or two apartment blocks rising out of the rice paddies.

So why do Koreans love apartments this much? It can't simply be a lack of land — plenty of European countries are smaller than Korea, yet nothing like this exists there. Perhaps, to find the real answer, we need to look back at a tradition that has quietly run through Korean homes for thousands of years: ondol, the underfloor heating system.

2. Ondol and Maru: The Historical Evolution of Traditional Korean Housing

To understand traditional Korean housing, you need to know two opposing elements that lived under the same roof: ondol (온돌) and maru (마루). Ondol, Korea's unique underfloor heating system, dates back to the era of Gojoseon and the Three Kingdoms period, originally known as gudeul. Heat and smoke from a small fire lit in the kitchen hearth traveled through a network of tunnels beneath the floor, warming the entire room from below. Maru, on the other hand, was an open wooden floor developed to cope with Korea's hot, humid summers, providing ventilation and a cool refuge from the heat. A home built to survive a freezing winter and a scorching summer, all under one roof — this dual design was Korea's ingenious answer to its four distinct seasons.

By the Joseon Dynasty, housing styles reflected social status quite plainly. The aristocratic yangban class lived in tile-roofed hanok, while commoners lived in thatched-roof houses made of straw. Even the roofing material told you everything about a family's rank and wealth. This traditional landscape remained largely unchanged until the mid-20th century, when the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement) of the 1960s–70s swept the country, replacing thatched roofs with tile and slate almost overnight. As industrialization and urbanization accelerated, the 1970s and 80s saw the rise of massive high-rise apartment complexes in areas like Yeouido, Banpo, and Apgujeong. The need to house a growing population on limited land converged with a new national dream — owning your own home — and apartments quickly became Korea's default way of living.

What's fascinating is that even as traditional houses vanished, ondol itself never disappeared. The hearth and stone flues are gone, but the underlying principle survives today in the hot-water pipe heating systems running beneath every apartment floor. In other words, behind Koreans' deep attachment to apartment living lies a heating philosophy thousands of years old — one that simply changed its form, not its soul.

 

Bukchon Hanok village

3. Where to Find Traditional Korean Houses Today

Even though Korea has become a nation of apartments, pockets of traditional housing still remain beautifully preserved across the country.

If you want to experience thatched-roof houses, head to Hahoe Village in Andong. A UNESCO World Heritage site, this village sits along a bend of the Nakdong River and preserves the original layout of a Joseon-era yangban clan village, where the tiled main house of the Ryu family and the thatched homes of commoners once coexisted. Yangdong Village in Gyeongju offers a similar experience, where tiled and thatched houses sit side by side, reflecting the social hierarchy of the era.

For the elegance of tile-roofed hanok, Bukchon Hanok Village in Seoul is the place to go. Nestled on a hillside between Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung Palaces, Bukchon is famous for its rippling rows of curved tiled rooftops, and today it draws crowds of young Koreans and international visitors alike, many dressed in rented hanbok for photos. Jeonju Hanok Village, with over 700 hanok clustered together, offers a more immersive scale, while Namsangol Hanok Village, right in the heart of Seoul, brings five restored Joseon-era houses together in an easily accessible spot.

For a more hands-on experience, Korean Folk Village in Yongin recreates regional housing styles and daily life from across the country, letting visitors watch — or even try — lighting an ondol fire or witnessing a traditional wedding ceremony. And don't miss one more detail: the coexistence of ondol and maru can be seen even inside Korea's royal palaces.

 

4. The Genius of Ondol — and Its Legacy in Every Apartment Today

The real brilliance of ondol isn't simply that it keeps you warm — it's how it warms you. Ondol is a radiant heating system that warms a room from the floor upward, aligning perfectly with the traditional wellness principle du-han-jok-yeol (頭寒足熱) — "cool head, warm feet." While Western fireplaces and radiators heat the air and rely on convection to circulate warmth, ondol heats the floor directly, bringing warmth closest to where the body actually rests. This is precisely why Koreans developed a floor-sitting, floor-sleeping culture that still shapes the feel of a Korean home today.

It's also why, the moment you step into any Korean home, you're expected to take your shoes off at the door. For Koreans, the floor was never just something you walked on — it was where you sat, ate, and slept, so keeping it clean wasn't a matter of etiquette but of basic hygiene and comfort. Every Korean entryway has a slightly lowered space called the hyeongwan (현관), a small transitional zone that exists for exactly this purpose: shoes come off there, and only socked or bare feet touch the warm ondol floor beyond it. This habit has proven remarkably durable — even in Korea's ultra-modern high-rise apartments, that same lowered entryway still greets every visitor, a small architectural echo of a floor culture thousands of years old.

Nowhere is the dignity of ondol more visible than at Gyeongbokgung Palace...